Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Deliberate Practice and Expert Performance
Today, the Freakonomics blog had an article about how A-Rod got as good as he is. While I think that hockey is the only team sport necessary (rock climbing being the only individual sport necessary), it didn’t keep me from being intrigued by the idea of expert performance and reading through.
A couple of years ago, I listened to Freakonomics and really enjoyed it. One of the topics I hadn’t remembered was the idea that a specific kind of deliberate practice gets someone closer to expert performance than anything else.
The idea, pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson in this research paper, asserts that “deliberate practice” is the single most important factor for expert performance, where expert performers would be people like Michael Jordan or the world’s top surgeons.
This idea nearly destroys the idea of inborn talent.
At the same time, it further supports that you must not only find what you love to do, but then do it, and keep doing it with “deliberate practice.”
Deliberate practice, in essence, is:
1. Focusing on technique instead of the outcome.
2. The setting of very specific goals and time-lines for achievement.
3. Receiving quick, high-quality feedback and folding that back into your practices.
I think that one of the great things about online business is that the people who are out there now and are succeeding are the ones that already do this to a certain degree. You can’t get the education for online commerce, SEO, Social Media, etc from college. You have to be in the middle of it, day in and day out, constantly moving and progressing toward new goals.
Forums are where you get your techniques from, and analytics are where you get your feedback. Your goals aren’t about what’s realistic - it’s not realistic to be the next Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos - your goals are for your to decide.
I don’t mean that in the pep-talk kind of way. I’m not one for pep talks. People who have worked with me in the past, know that. Instead, I mean that in a very pragmatic kind of way. That it’s a belief that will result in greater achievement than others within the same realm of practice.
This same idea is inherent in resistance training for both hypertrophy and strength, it’s seen everywhere in sports, it’s most certainly seen in the marketplace, and through practices such as Six Sigma.
If you want to be great at what you love, rethink how you can deliberately practice those things you want to accomplish.
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on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 12:45 pm:
[…] Confident Goal Setting - I’m currently constructing an ontology for improvement, and this post references a great experiment that took a person of “average intelligence,” worked with them for 3-5 hours a week, and brought that person’s memory level (tested by memorizing random strings of numbers) to that of the best memories in the world…well, within the realm of random number. I’m waiting on the specific details of the experiment, but you can see how well this fits in with deliberate practice and expert performance. […]